“Yeth. No! I vath not! I hadn’t gotten to it yet. But ath I vath thaying, vun day I vath lying on the bank vatching the fith play. I vath thinking about getting up and making a hook and pole to catch thome. All of a thudden, I heard a thyout. I looked up. There, coming around the bend of The River vath thith terrible monthter.
“It vath awful. I jumped up, and I vath going to run avay vhen I thaw it had men on itth back. They looked like men, but vhen the monthter got clother, I thaw they were thpindly little runtth vith the mange and no notheth to thpeak of. I could have beat them all to death vith vone hand, and yet they were riding thith monthter Riverthnake like beeth on a bear’th back. Tho. . . .”
Clemens, listening, felt again as he had when he first heard the story. He felt as if he were standing by the side of this creature from the dawn of man. Despite the clanging and lisping and halting and slow groping after words, this Titan spoke impressively. Clemens could feel his panic and his wonder and almost overpowering urge to run away. Clemens could also feel the opposing urge, the primate’s curiosity, the thing that made him, if not wholly a man, at least a near cousin. Behind the shelving brow lay the gray pulse that would not be content just to exist but must be fed on the shapes of unknown things, on patterns never before seen.
So Joe Miller stayed upon the bank, though his hand closed around the handle of the grail, ready to carry it with him if he had to flee.
The monster floated closer. Joe began to think that it might not be alive. But if it were not, why the great head poised at its front as if to strike? Yet it did not look alive. It gave a feeling of deadness. This did not mean much, of course. Joe had seen a wounded bear pretend death convincingly and then rise up and tear the arm off a fellow hunter.
Moreover, though he had seen the hunter die, he had also seen the hunter alive again, that day he awoke on the banks with others of his kind. And if he, and Joe, too, could come alive again, why couldn’t this petrified snakelike head lose its dead woodenness and seize him in its teeth?
But he ignored his fears and, trembling, approached the monster. He was a Titan, older brother to man, fresh with the dawn and with the primate’s have-to-know-what’sgoing-on.
A pygmy, mangy as the others but wearing on his brow a glass circlet with a stained-red flaming sun, beckoned to Joe Miller. The others upon the wooden beast stood behind the man with the glass circlet and held spears and strange devices that Joe learned later were bows and arrows. They did not seem frightened of the colossus, but that may have been because they were so tired from their seldom-ceasing rowing against the current that they did not care what happened.
It took a long time for the pygmy chief to get Joe aboard the ship. They came ashore to charge their grails while Joe backed away from them. They ate, and Joe ate also, but at a distance. His fellows had run for the hills, having been also panicked by the ship. Presently seeing that the Riversnake did not threaten Joe, they slowly approached it. The pygmies retreated to the ship.
And now the chief took a strange object from his grail and held a glowing wire to its tip, and smoke came from it and from the pygmy’s mouth. Joe jumped at the first puff; his fellows scattered for the foothills again. Joe wondered if the noseless pygmies could be the brood of the dragon. Perhaps her children took this larval form, but, like their mother, they could breathe out fire and smoke?
“But I ain’t a dummy,” Joe said. “It didn’t take me long to figure out that the thmoke came from the obchect, vhich in Englith ith a thigar. Their chief made it plain that if I’d get on the thyip, I could thmoke the thigar. Now, I mutht’ve been crathy to do tho, but I vanted to thmoke that thigar. Maybe I thought I’d impreth my tribe, I don’t know.”